


Across the Threshold

by mysticmartin



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (Comics)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22482964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysticmartin/pseuds/mysticmartin
Summary: What if, instead of a Time Lord, the Doctor was... something else?
Kudos: 3





	Across the Threshold

**Author's Note:**

> This story originally appeared in the anthology Unbound: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Jacob Black, Frank Holder, James K. Maddox, Anne-Laure Tuduri, and Niki Haringsma.

I.  
Commander Woolf was having a weird day. So weird, in fact, that his naval base being besieged and half his crew being eaten by a giant mushroom creature was only the fourth strangest thing to have happened to him.  
The third strangest had been the arrival of a mysterious old man, dressed in rags and a bow tie. He called himself ‘the Doctor’, yet he constantly deferred to Medical Officer Joyce (at least until the latter was eaten) rather than his own knowledge. His face was lined and grey, yet he moved with the vigour of a tiger, his eyes glinting with an almost sinister life force. He claimed to be ‘from the Ministry’, but his arrival, coinciding as it did with that of the giant mushroom creature, meant he garnered no small amount of suspicion.  
The second strangest thing had been the giant mushroom creature’s eventual defeat. Commander Woolf had no idea the recorder was so powerful, as an instrument of both music and sonic disruption.  
But by far the strangest thing that had happened to Commander Woolf that day was being invited into the Doctor’s ship. The apparently tiny wooden box (the Doctor called it the T.A.R.D.I.S.) gave way to a vast, cavernous interior, bearing no apparent connection to the wood surrounding it. Commander Woolf yelped, and jerked instinctively back into the freezing twilight. After all he’d seen, Commander Woolf still feared the apparently impossible.

‘It’s alright,’ said the Doctor, framed in the old wooden doorframe, and the unearthly light within. ‘Most people have a little shock the first time.’  
‘I-I c-can’t,’ Commander Woolf stuttered.  
‘But I am your only option if you want to get home,’ said the Doctor.  
‘I don’t - what?’  
‘The mushroom creature has devoured your food supplies. You’d starve to death long before rescue arrived,’ the Doctor smiled, not unkind, though the light was still dancing in his eyes.  
‘Unless you come with me. I can have you back to base in no time, and you can warn your superiors to never venture here again.’  
The Doctor smiled again.  
‘So what do you say? Will you come with me?’  
‘I-I-I…Yes.’  
The Doctor grinned, but his eyes showed only the cold blankness of the freezing waves below. His white teeth glowed in the rising moon. 

II.  
‘I’ve finally found you, Doc!’  
‘Good heavens! Who are you?’  
The Doctor stared at the Whifferdil currently impersonating his TARDIS’s time rotor.  
‘Never mind that! I’ve finally caught you! And I demand that you take me to Venus!’  
‘Are you threatening me? Listen, I’ve been threatened by experts, you know! Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Daleks, BBC Producers…’  
The time rotor straightened its glasses and adopted its most intimidating tone.  
‘Now listen here, Doc! I dunno who you are or how this blasted contraption works, but if you don’t take me to Venus right now, we’ll both be in big trouble!’  
The Doctor paused. A smile began to creep over his face. The effect was almost as disturbing as his eye-piercing coat.  
‘So… you want me to take me with you?’  
‘Yes!’  
‘You give your consent, crossing my threshold, and inviting yourself into the vortex of reality?’  
‘Yes! Now get this thing moving!’  
The Doctor’s smile deepened, and P.I. Frobisher began to doubt he knew who he was dealing with.  
‘Say no more. If you wanted a lift, you only had to ask…’  
The real time rotor began to revolve, and Frobisher was never seen again. 

III.  
Doctor Grace Holloway had had enough of this shit.  
Having started the day being harassed by a strange man dressed as Lord Byron, she had been respectively chased, poisoned, possessed, and literally killed before being brought back home by the very same man is the very same ill-fitting costume. Given all of this, Grace was extremely keen to ditch the weirdo and go home, which made his following request more than a little irritating.  
The Doctor grinned, his smile still a little too wide, his eyes still cold and bored-looking.  
‘Grace,’ he said. ‘There’s something you should know.’  
‘Don’t tell me.’ Grace was not in the mood.  
‘Why not?’  
‘I know who I am, and that’s enough.’  
‘I’m glad,’ said the Doctor, his teeth sharp and shiny in the moonlight. ‘Come with me.’  
Grace took a moment to contemplate the sheer cheek of the man, and whether slapping him at this point would be entirely polite. She decided to play it safe.  
‘No,’ she said. ‘You come with me.’  
The Doctor blinked.  
‘Me come with you?’  
‘Yes,’ said Grace, thinking she might finally have gotten rid of this clown.  
The Doctor was suddenly extremely pale.  
‘Me…Come with you?’  
‘You heard me right. Now either get lost or-‘  
‘Me! Come with…. YOU?!’  
The Doctor was frozen to the spot. There were tears in his eyes, and his hands had started to shake.  
‘That’s not fair!’ the Doctor was shouting.  
‘What?’  
‘Me coming with you! That’s not how it’s supposed to work!’  
‘What the’-  
Grace had just noticed the Doctor’s teeth. Really noticed them. Noticed that his incisors were nearly seven inches long, almost like he was a…  
‘You’re a vampire!’ she yelled.  
‘Of course I’m a vampire!’ the Doctor was raving now, his eyes filled with an alien contempt.  
‘I’m the Doctor, of House Prydonia, the last of the Great Vampires!’  
‘What are you talking about?”  
‘Things far beyond your earthly comprehension, human girl! When my kind had feasted on the last of the Time Lords, absorbed their regenerative powers, and remade Gallifrey in their image, I started to get bored. I wondered if there might be food elsewhere! And I was right! A whole universe, teeming with prey! There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most delicious things. Things which act entirely in a vampire’s interests. They must be eaten!’  
Grace would have thought the Doctor mad, if he didn’t have such a terrified look in his eyes, if every fibre of his being didn’t seem to be shaking as if it wanted to consume her.  
‘Is that what tonight was about?’  
‘It’s what it’s all about, foolish mortal! This is what I do!’  
‘What is?’  
‘This is! This whole ‘dashing adventurer’ act! I swoop in somewhere, ideally somewhere a bunch of slow-witted apes are having some trouble, their little hearts pounding fit to burst, their blood full of hormones and adrenalin. Then I save them, and just as I’m about to leave I invite them to come with me. That’s how I get them!’  
‘What’s how you get them?’  
‘The invitation. You stupid primitives think we can’t come in unless you invite us. A pathetic notion! It’s by inviting you in that we’re able to feed!’  
‘How?’  
‘The invitation creates a quantum lock! By accepting, the prey shuts themselves out of causality. That’s what gives us a licence to feed! It’s how we manage to eat while preserving the web of time!’  
‘But now-‘  
‘But now, you stupid ape, you’ve trapped me in it!’  
‘So you’re… stuck here?’  
‘Yes, you carbon-based cretin! Your stupidity has skewed the quantum lock entirely in your direction! I am now yours to command!’  
‘What? I don’t-‘  
‘Curse you, Doctor Holloway!’  
Doctor Grace Holloway sighed.It had already been a long day. Now it looked to be an even longer night.  
She turned and began her slow trudge home, her new pet trailing and cursing behind her.


End file.
